British music-theatre works of the 1960s and early 1970s largely avoided direct engagement with contemporary political topics. Intriguing in this light is Michael Hall's recent proposition that Brecht's music theatre set the terms for younger British composers’ experiments with the genre. Brecht proved a complicated model, however, because of composers’ anxieties about music's capability to convey sociopolitical messages, and their reluctance to accord popular music a progressive function. The entanglement of Vietnam War activism and rock music forms the backdrop for analyses of two works that do address Vietnam directly: Anthony Gilbert's The Scene-Machine and George Newson's Arena (both 1971) – both of which also pass pointed comment on different popular-music traditions. Both works highlight the difficulty in emulating Brecht's model in an era when the concept of ‘the political’ was being significantly redefined, and the cultural gap between activist cadres and the wider population was unprecedentedly visible.

The undoubted cause célèbre of the 1969 Holland Festival was the large-scale music theatre piece Reconstructie, jointly authored by a team of five young composers and two librettists. The work, which took as its subject ‘the struggle against US imperialism in Latin America’, and revolved around the figure of Che Guevara, embodied the authors’ dual commitment to political engagement and artistic experiment. My account examines the work through the lens of recent scholarship that stresses the politically reactionary function of avant-garde experimentation within the cultural Cold War. In the process, attention is given to broader factors affecting the work’s production and reception: these include contemporaneous debates about cultural popularising and the Holland Festival; the complex motives of the work’s governmental patrons; and the influence upon the authors of Cuba, Castro and Guevara himself.

Nottingham, 1 May 2004: the Kamkars, a group of Kurdish musicians from Iran, close a concert with a flamboyant instrumental encore based upon a song performed earlier in the evening.

This article argues that music offers experiences of change that are at odds with our common understanding of time. Specifically, I question the widespread belief that onward motion is a condition of musical temporality. I approach this issue through metaphor theory, which tends to argue for the necessity of metaphorical experiences of time and music in terms of motion. I argue that music's changing sound evokes a variety of bodily metaphors; motion is not ever-present, but intermingles with metaphors of heat, light, weight, tension and so on. Works by Ligeti, Carter, Kurtág and Saariaho are discussed as case studies.

Getting to grips with Harrison Birtwistle's ever expanding oeuvre is becoming an increasingly challenging business. The forthcoming South Bank Centre festival naturally provides occasion for some critical stocktaking. Yet the retrospective schemas within which composers' works are traditionally placed seem less than usually appropriate. The idea of linear development is of as limited use to understanding Birtwistle's creative progress as it is to explaining his musical forms. Contrasting musical surfaces, for instance, testify to the difficulty of useful generalization about the recent works' lineage. Whereas the crisp, pulse-based clarity of many pages in The Cry of Anubis bears comparison with moments in Earth Dances and the contemporaneous Words Overheard, Panic's impenetrable textures and sonorities are more reminiscent of the earlier Verses for Ensembles and An Imaginary Landscape. The treatment of musical form in the recent works similarly resists summary description.